I Invented A New Guitar Tuning – Inside-Out Standard

It’s true. I made something all by myself. If you could print a video, my mom would hang it on the refrigerator.

Imagine, if you will, a tuning of the guitar that is different from standard tuning, but doesn’t require you to change the way you played the guitar at all. Every single pattern, fingering, shape, scale, chord – everything – is exactly the same, and just sounds like the bizarro world version.

Such a thing exists – at least, it does now! I call it Inside-Out Standard.

The tuning is thus: E A D G B E. Looks like E standard, right? But the twist is that you tune it from high to low, instead of low to high. Not upside-down or backwards, like a lefty guitar flipped over – still E A D G B E from your perspective, but where your 6th string is your high E (2 octaves higher than usual), then A (+1 octave), then D (+1 octave), G (same as usual) then B (1 octave lower) and E (2 octaves lower).

This allows you to play everything as you normally would, but with built-in octave displacement that scrambles the octave that each of the notes normally sits in. I’ve had a blast playing around with this, and in conjunction with a standard tuned guitar it could create some seriously fun sounds. It’s like Nashville tuning, but less one-dimensional and has broader uses.

Let me know if you tried it, and how it worked out for you!

Thanks to SIT Strings for providing me with awesome strings for this video.